Are We All Playing the Same Game? The Economic Effects of Constitutions Depend on the Degree of Institutionalization

German Caruso, Carlos Scartascini and Mariano Tommasi

No IDB-WP-237, Research Department Publications from Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department

Abstract: The understanding of the economic effect of formal institutional rules has progressed substantially in recent decades. These formal analyses have tended to take for granted that institutional arenas such as Congress are the places where decision-making takes place. That is a good approximation in some cases (such as many developed countries today) but not in others. If countries differ in how institutionalized their policymaking is, it is possible that the impact of formal political rules on policy outcomes might depend on that. This paper explores that hypothesis and finds that some important claims regarding the impact of constitutions on policy outcomes do not hold for countries in which institutionalization is low. The findings suggest the need to develop a broader class of policymaking models in which the degree to which decision-making follows 'the rules' is also endogenized.

JEL-codes: D72 D73 D78 H20 H60 H62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-law, nep-pke and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=37936003 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=37936003 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=37936003)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are we all playing the same game? The economic effects of constitutions depend on the degree of institutionalization (2015)
Working Paper: Are We All Playing the Same Game?: The Economic Effects of Constitutions Depend on the Degree of Institutionalization (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:wpaper:idb-wp-237

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Department Publications from Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().